Focus: Adults in the Room - We Keep Us Safe: The Standoff

Episode Date: September 24, 2026

In the summer of 2020, protests are happening all across the country. But Seattle is different. A confrontation between protestors and police outside a precinct leads to the birth of CHOP. A thousand miles away, Antonio Mays Jr. hears about what’s happening in Seattle. He was shot and killed there three weeks later. We Keep Us Safe is part of Focus, a dedicated documentary channel from KUOW Puget Sound Public Radio in Seattle, a proud member of the NPR network. Get in touch with the team by email at [e-mail]. Support KUOW and projects like this by donating at kuow.org/donate/focus.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Some of the world's biggest companies have brought jobs and wealth to the Seattle region. That growth has come with some real pains, too. There are these hotspots. Seattle has the potential to be one of those. Tech people are getting replaced by AI, and you can't replace us with AI yet. I'm Monica Nicholsberg. And I'm Joshua McNichols. We host Booming, a podcast about the economic forces shaping our lives here in the Pacific Northwest. We get into the stories that hit your wallet and our region.

Listen now on the KOWW app or wherever you listen. Focus from KUOW in Seattle. Heads up before we start. This episode contains explicit language. You'll also hear intense audio of confrontations between protesters and police, including the sound of flashbangs and other loud, booming noises. Previously on, we keep us safe. More shots fired, more shots fired.

More shots fired, more shots fired. A protest becomes a crime scene. When you come in shooting, You got shot back. We can hear what happens next, the fatal shooting of Antonio, but we can't see it. I should have some answers. I should have some closure. How did a protest for black lives end up killing a black teenager?

He wanted to join the protest against police brutality. This is a real-life black movement that was going down in his lifetime. The last time Antonio May's senior saw his son was in the early morning hours of June 23, 2020. Later that morning, Antonio Mays Jr. was gone. The only trace of him was a note tucked into the handle of a fridge in the family's garage. It said that he was going to make me proud. He said he was going to go accomplish something. Antonio Sr. filed a missing person's report right away.

We put in a records request with the Los Angeles Police Department to see if we could get a copy. And not only did we get back the report at the time, itself, but we also got back the letter that Antonio Jr. left for his dad. On the outside of the letter, it says, please read all the way through. I love you, dad. You raised a strong young man. I'm going to make you proud. And this is what Antonio Jr. wrote in part. Dear dad, I am leaving because with everything that is going on in the world, I've been feeling this need to partake and stand up for our people. My little sister is always on my mind. When I think about these things, the thought of anything happening to her brings me anxiety

and stress. On top of the fact that you work all the time, I can't help but worry about the possible things that could happen to you. On this journey that I am taking, my goals are simple. Become a better person I know you could be proud of and someone my sister could look up to. I hope you can forgive me for leaving, but know that I am not running from home. I'm fighting for a cause. One day, I want my sister to live in a world where her skin won't be the cause of any pain for her physically or emotionally. I love the both of you dearly and with all my heart, but I really do believe God is trying to tell me something. So I'm trying my best to follow.

P.S. Also, don't get angry or upset with my decision, please. I love you dearly, your son. So from this note, we see this idealistic kid in Southern California who left home to make a mark on the world. But there's something this letter doesn't explain. Why did Antonio travel a thousand miles to a city where his dad says he'd never been? Why did Antonio go to Seattle? At that time, protests were happening across the country.

Of course, it all started in Minneapolis, where George Floyd was murdered on May 25, 2020. But then it very quickly spread. Soon it got to Los Angeles, where Antonio lived. Then the Bay Area, Portland, San Diego. There will be a revolution. They will be a change. It's not going to be the same again. I promise you. For a Southern California kid with plenty of places to protest nearby,

Seattle doesn't seem like the go-to choice. But Seattle was different. Seattle became a destination for protesters in a way that other cities didn't. It was a place where police actually retreated, and protesters claimed a space of their own. Form their own community. Seattle was different because Seattle, had CHOP.

But before CHOP had a name, before Tense occupied eight city blocks in a police-free zone, it was a protest for racial justice. As we looked into the question of how and why Antonio was killed, we realized that the answer starts with a standoff between protesters and police

that led to the creation of CHOP and set it on a trajectory that led to Antonio's death. From NPR's Embedded with KUAW in the Seattle Times, this is We Keep Us Safe. I'm Sydney Brownstone. And I'm Will James. This is episode two. I'm Chris Morgan, host of the wild.

Over the last 35 years, I've worked in the wildest places on Earth, tracking tigers in Siberia, filming orangutans in Borneo, following humpback whales, migrating jaguars, iridescent hummingbirds, and learning from the people devoted to protecting them. These stories changed how I see the world. I think they'll do the same for you. The Wild with Chris Morgan, available wherever you get your podcasts. I think we have to start by saying that protest is kind of a thing in Seattle.

Before daybreak, squads of police carrying duffel bags full of gear began moving into position for the WTO's opening ceremonies. This is where the protests against the World Trade Organization went down in 1999. Everywhere you look to WTO delegates were trying to get to the convention center, and it was becoming obvious the protesters were succeeding in stopping them. And then there are the big annual workers' rights protests like Mayday, where reporters are used to covering what we call smashy-smashy. There's usually a mainstream march, rallies, families with kids,

and then at the margins, there are, few more radical protesters who are breaking windows of corporations downtown. There's even a song about it. So while Seattle is the kind of town where protests are family activity, we're also known for having an edgier side. When the George Floyd protests arrived in Seattle, people in the streets smashed windows downtown as usual. And then someone set a police car on fire.

We also had this wave of property damage in Chinatown, these smaller family-run businesses as well. That was an early indication that, okay, maybe this one is different. Then there was the police response. That first weekend, they were already breaking out the tear gas and blast balls at a scale we hadn't seen here since WTO more than 20 years before. In one instance, when police pepper sprayed a crowd, they hit a 7-year-old. Someone videotaped the aftermath.

That got a lot of people paying attention because families were used to bringing out their kids to protests here safely. This was a sign something had changed. This was all happening about three weeks before Antonio would get to Seattle. These protests were unruly. They were confusing. And everyone in Seattle was trying to make sense of what was happening on our streets. A lot of people started to tune into this one journalist. He always seemed to.

to be at the center of the action. The detective here is fucked up. They're putting the peaceful guys right here. It's taking all your resources. I think it was important to be able to give what the protesters' perspective was. You know what I'm saying? Omari Salisbury is the founder of Converge Media.

It's a local news outlet he started to cover Seattle's historically black central district. But once the protests kicked off, his live streams captured the most comprehensive view that we have into the events before and after Antonio arrived in Seattle. Omari partnered with us to help piece together what made Seattle so unique during the protests of 2020.

He was on the front lines of one of the biggest confrontations in Seattle that summer, pink umbrella day. The flashpoint is what we called it. The pink umbrella scene around the world. So here's how we get to Pink Umbrella Day. Over that first weekend, the protests grew from hundreds of people to thousands. Four days after the protests started, protesters decided they were going to march past the East Precinct. The East Precinct is about four blocks in front of us.

That's the Seattle Police Precinct that covers the historically young, gay, activist-heavy neighborhood of Capitol Hill, and also the historically black neighborhood that Omari grew up in the Central District. The energy of the protests had been converging here. But on this day, when protesters march up Capitol Hill, they find their path blocked by a line of police officers who had set up a barricade. There's a barricade around the East Precinct.

There's a barricade. Lots of officers. Protesters didn't know why the police wouldn't let them march down. the street. But now we know that city leaders were afraid the crowd would burn down the precinct. It had happened in Minneapolis. And police all around the country were getting warnings from the federal government that protesters might attack their buildings too. Protestors didn't back off. The crowd swells. Hundreds of protesters press up against the metal barricade. They're chanting for

police to let them march past. The front line of that person, protest for as far as we could see, and it was a long way I couldn't see all the way back. These is people in jeans and t-shirts, man. They didn't come for war or battle. As they press on the barricade, it starts to bend. On the other side are dozens of police and National Guard. SWAT officers with gas masks and batons move to the front. What we could expect next is tear gas, wide tear gas, and possibly flashbacks.

Some of the protester posture changed as well. They're like, oh, they're getting ready to mace us. Okay, the umbrellas are here. You see people put out the umbrellas to block the spray. Protesters use a tactic from Hong Kong, where they would bring umbrellas to shield themselves from pepper spray. Let's just try to bring this down, guys. A protester in the front is holding a pink umbrella. And she opens the umbrella, the cop, grabs the umbrella.

So we see him grabbing the umbrella. And then they start going back and forth pulling over the umbrella. Multiple protesters and multiple police wrestling over the pink umbrella. And, man, that's where all hell started breaking loose. There's the spray. There's a spray.

They're putting the pepper. The police started randomly spraying everybody in the crowd. Your skin starts to burn. Me, fuckers, I'm going to eat this shit, though. I remember I got spray in the eye. Get the fuck out my wife. It was overwhelming force. There wasn't any attempt by the SPD to any real kind of de-escalation.

The protesters were shocked by the level of force that they saw. Seattle police said it was justified. They released a statement saying they declared a riot because protesters threw rocks, bottles, and fireworks, and also tried to break through the barricades. These guys escalated a situation. and then put out a release, said the protesters started a riot. I'm like, well, shit, I got the receipts, buddy.

Months later, Seattle's Office of Police Accountability only found evidence of one bottle being thrown. They determined protesters didn't pose much of a threat. In fact, the report said police violated their own policy by using pepper spray and other weapons to break up the crowd. That decision police made to block off protesters at the East precinct it would set off a chain reaction. The aftershocks were still being felt weeks later

when Antonio arrived in Seattle. The violence protesters faced on Pink Umbrella Day actually galvanized the movement. The protesters, they could just say, look at what police are doing to us. Look at what police are doing right now. By showing up, we are eliciting a reaction from police

that demonstrates our entire point. And it becomes less about we are protesting police brutality nationally to we are protesting the Seattle Police. After Pink Umbrella Day, protesters keep showing up. For a full week, they try to march past the East Precinct, but police won't let them and keep tear gassing and pepper spraying the crowd. And a kind of infrastructure, a protest infrastructure, hardens around the area. There are mutual aid stations, volunteer medics, free food, goggles for the tear gas and pepper spray.

Local businesses open up their restrooms to protesters. All of this was happening in a leaderless, decentralized way. The same kind of organizing we've seen in a lot of left-wing mass movements over the years. but some leaders did emerge organically from the crowd. Some of these leaders would end up crossing paths with Antonio and show up at key moments in his time here. But that's still weeks away at this point. David Lewis was someone who I think most protesters

had never heard of before. Before 2020, I was just a project manager. at Lulu Lemon. David's Tall, wears glasses, a newsboy cap, gives off a professorial vibe. Like Antonio, he grew up steeped in the story of black civil rights. In fact, he is related to the victim of one of the most infamous cases of white mob violence in American history. Emmett Till, actually, is my cousin.

My grandmother and Emmett Till, Sr. would, you know, spend the summers in the watering hole in New Madrid. And my grandmother marched with Dr. King at Selma. Yeah, this has been my life. And 2020 kind of transformed him into a protester. I remember calling my mom and saying, mom, I think I have to go out there. She says, what are you going to do there? You know, what are your goals?

What are you wanting to do? I said, I don't know. She said, before you go out, you need to know who you're going to be in this space. And he became kind of one of these breakout stars. Like people just started paying attention to him and deferring to him. and deferring to him because he was charismatic and seemed like he had a well-thought-out worldview. If we can leverage the access and the attention

and the tension that we have created, not just in Seattle, but on a nationwide scale, we could make fundamental change. David Lewis kind of became the organizer to which other breakout organizers were drawn to. And that was when I first met Rishila. Rashila Levitt was a local bartender, and she brought this gift for connecting with people to the protests. When she got in front of a crowd, she would be able to, you know, she would leverage and utilize her voice to be able to move people.

David kind of looked at me and he was like, you're loud. I was like, yeah. She's not just loud. She's passionate. She's also recognizable. At the time, she had these long locks. so you could easily spot her out of a crowd. He handed me a megaphone. He was like, he was like, just keep doing what you're doing.

All of a sudden, I was in this role that I wasn't expecting. And it just escalated from there. One thing that made Rishaila and David stand out early on was that they had strong convictions about how to protest effectively. Like, we're not going to break windows. We're not going to vandalize. They wanted these protests to be disqualized. We weren't here to just create chaos. We were here to protest police brutality.

The people flooding into the streets that summer were showing up for all kinds of reasons. Not everyone was there for George Floyd. The pandemic was raging. Some people were just frustrated, scared, lonely, bored. And leaders like David and Rishila were trying to harness that raw energy to achieve the movement's goals. Protesters had three main demands. Cut the police budget by at least 50%, reinvest in social services, and drop charges against protesters who had been arrested. While more and more of the movement's energy

was focused on the barricade outside the East Precinct, there were still marches going on elsewhere in the city. We kind of got this idea in our heads of, let's just go all the way to the top. It's not even about the police chief anymore. Like, now we need to speak to the mayor. We were able to march 7,000 people exactly to where the mayor was. Now, listen, folks, listen, we have news cameras.

We want to make sure that this message is seen across the world, across the nation, loud and clear, and it is not diluted. At this point, there's real movement in the protesters' direction. Multiple city council members are showing up to stand with protesters against police. We sat down and we said we will not leave until Mayor Durkin comes out. Mayor Jenny Durkin was a former federal prosecutor and elected as a pro-business moderate Democrat. Like a lot of big city mayors, she was trying to maintain order while still showing support for the protest movement. And within about 10 minutes, the deputy mayor comes out and says, Mayor Durkin is here. She will see you now.

We want you to march. We want you to raise your voices. We want you to continue on the path of justice. These new protest leaders, who were regular people just a couple of days ago, end up sitting face to face with Seattle's mayor. After that meeting with the mayor, the support was palpable. We had eyes and ears everywhere in every piece of the government. And if you were an SPD and you went to a grocery store, that grocer was messaging me.

To the police, it feels like the entire city is turning on them. We are changing things. This is a start to a start. And it needs to stay that way. But the only way it is to stay that way. Everyone wondered, what would the police do next? The moves they ended up making would lead directly to the creation of chop and add to the climate of fear that would take over by the time Antonio arrived.

That's after the break. In the summer of 2020, 16-year-old Antonio Mays Jr. traveled a thousand miles to join the racial justice movement of his generation in Seattle. Six years later, his killing remains unsolved. Our investigation has uncovered new evidence and witnesses who say they've never talked to police. Listen to We Keep Us Safe, a new investigative docu series from KUOW, The Seattle Times, and Embedded. Search KUOW Focus, wherever you can. Get podcasts. A week after Pink Umbrella Day, protesters' worst fears materialized.

It started with an incident on a day that came to be known as Bloody Sunday. There was a car that turned onto that street, and I could hear people yelling on that corner, and I'm like, uh-oh, and we're watching him, and like, maybe it's an accident. Danielle Meehan was an ICU nurse, volunteering as a protest medic. She was in the crowd when she saw a car driving up a car. side street, straight toward the group protesting outside the East Precinct. And then he started to accelerate. And I remember just thinking, oh my God, my friends are going to die.

It looked like a car attack. And then I heard a gunshot and I froze for a second. And then people started screaming for medics, and so I just took off running towards them again. He has a gun. He just got shot. A protester tried to stop the car as it came close to plowing into the car. to plowing into the crowd. He reached into the driver's side window,

and the driver shot him in the arm. Danielle arrived in time to help him. Someone gave me a knife, and I'd cut off his shirt, and found the wound, and found that there was no exit wound. I'm like, okay, he's going to be okay. In the confusion, the driver got out of the car and managed to slip through the crowd to the police line to surrender himself.

It turns out that this driver was the brother of a police officer who was assigned to the East precinct. He told police he drove toward the crowd by accident and he fired in self-defense. In the end, prosecutors said they only had enough evidence to charge him with reckless driving. But the way the driver was able to slip past police lines with a gun and walk into the precinct without resistance

seemed to protesters to be a sign that this was a war, And it was clear which side the police were on. So we want to keep this safe. There is no reason for this to get escalated as it is. Please return to the other side of whatever. They take him into custody. And that's just like, oh my God, that's just the start of today. All week, Tammy Floyd had been watching the standoff escalate.

She was a Seattle police lieutenant at the time and a top aide to the commander managing the police's response to the protests. What is going to happen? Tammy says she'd warned her boss that stopping the crowd from marching past the precinct could turn explosive

between protesters and police. And now it was. Bloody Sunday saw the most severe protester injuries since the protests began. There was a woman who was hit in the chest with a tear gas canister. You just hit her like, And she lost consciousness.

Her heart stopped. I remember her eyes looked super bloodshot. She really wanted to go home. She's like, I just want to go home. Then she stopped talking. And she was still laying down and I'm like, oh, she's not breathing. I don't have a pulse.

I started CPR. I'm like, holy shit. Luckily, there were volunteer medics there to revive her, but she could have died. We had nothing. We were not. safe. We had no resources. It is a miracle that we were able to save her. Police also felt like their worst fears were coming true. Two officers went to the hospital with

injuries. By nightfall, there was this overwhelming kind of impending sense of doom. I was receiving calls from commanders that were trapped. The crowd had swelled. And they were not backing off. There are officers crying, breaking down. There were leadership, command, also breaking down, convinced tonight they were going to die. We were going to be overrun. The morning after Bloody Sunday, Tammy's boss was called into an emergency meeting with top city officials.

A lot of the mayor's staff is there, deputy mayors. Tom Mahaffee was an assistant police chief and the person responsible for overseeing the police's response to the protests. They say we can't continue with what we're doing, just let the protesters march by. It was just so volatile at this point. There was so much anger and angst. The mayor's staff wanted him to open up the street.

They told police to plan on emptying the precinct of guns, ammo, and evidence. Protesters could break in. But Tom could be. shake his fear that protesters would burn down the whole precinct. We were getting information from our intelligence unit who were connected to various resources throughout the country and the FBI, that there's a likelihood they would target other police facilities because of what happened to Minneapolis. For a while, we weren't sure whether the FBI had passed along information about

a specific threat to the East precinct. But former Mayor Durkan told us they did. She was briefed on this threat. She said this in an email this spring, but was unable to sit down for an in-person interview with us. Tom Mahaffee says he came up with a plan to deal with the threat of a fire. He was going to let the protesters march past the East precinct. But he wasn't just going to remove weapons and documents like the mayor's office wanted. He was going to remove the officers, too. If protesters just walked past, then great, police could just wait them out. and go back to work in the precinct.

If protesters attacked, tried to set the building on fire or break in, police would swoop in from outside and make arrests. And if the building did burn down, at least there wouldn't be any officers to get trapped inside. Tammy Floyd, who worked as Tom's aide, had been worrying for days that police leaders would abandon the East precinct.

And now, to her, it was actually happening. I went and sat in the watch commander office and sat down in a chair and just teared up. I had no words. I had no words. And, you know, he looks at me and says, oh, my God, they're going to give it up, aren't they? And I just shook my head. Shook my head, yes. And just started crying.

Tammy wondered, why did police fight? so hard to defend the precinct if this was the outcome. It was a complete collapse of your very mission, which was public safety. For Tammy, this was the decision that set the stage for CHOP and everything that came after. It was that fork in the road that went one way instead of the other, and history is what it is because of that. he wouldn't have had three weeks or 23 days of nightly mayhem. I think we wouldn't have had the shootings. I think some people would be alive today.

Yeah, I feel, and I believe it would have been very different. I always bristle at the fact that we gave up a precinct. It's like, it's way more nuanced than that. Like, I'm not trying to make excuses for it. because we had to make quick decisions that were going to be significantly impactful to the safety of Seattle police officers and the citizens of Seattle and the protesters.

I still believe that the decision that I made, given the circumstances that we were faced, was the right one. After we talked with Tom Mahaffey and Tammy Floyd, we asked Seattle police about the department's conduct during the protests, why they set up the barricade and used crowd control weapons on protest.

there, why they walked away from the precinct. The department declined to answer our questions. The day after Bloody Sunday, Rashila Levitt, one of the new protest leaders, notices something feels off outside the East Precinct. The police has started to like thin out almost. People thought that they were just doing like a shift change. But by that evening, it's clear something is happening.

This is the scene now. Journalist Omari Salisbury is there, recording as usual. Seattle police are going to be abandoned in the East Precinct. We're right here behind the barricade. And the police are now moving out. The street is going to open up. The police are actually packing up. They're leaving.

And it was that moment that we were like, we won. This is a victory. Like, we did something. At first, for protesters and even some residents of the neighborhood, this is a relief, no more tear gas every night. But now the question is, what are the protesters going to do? And there was a couple different opposing moments and viewpoints and ideas. We're like, no, we should eat March.

We'll do this at our third. And then other people were like, no, like, if we leave, they're going to come back. And that kind of sparked this idea of we should stay. This was the beginning of a protest encampment that would come to be known as the Capitol Hill occupied protest. Chop. The Capitol Hill organized protest. The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. Surprisingly little is known about Chop.

It became a national spectacle, and right-wing media started. calling it a takeover of part of Seattle. They planted a flag and they stole it, just like the conquistador. And the protesters moved in to occupy roughly a six-block area of Seattle. But protesters never set out to drive police away from the precinct. They didn't set out to form an occupation. With all this negative attention, many Seattleites felt like they needed to correct the record and defend the protesters.

Let's bring in the mayor of Seattle now. Jenny Durkan, well. Welcome back, Ms. Mayor. How long do you think Seattle in those few blocks looks like this? I don't know. We could have the summer of love. A thousand miles away, Antonio May's senior and his son were talking about what was going on in Seattle.

I talked to him about that precinct that was overran in Seattle, and then they barricaded their neighborhood. That to me was like, that was an unprecedented thing at that time. That's never happened. I've never heard that happening. So I'm sharing this stuff with my son, history is happening right before our eyes. Antonio Mays Sr. had forbidden his son from joining the protests.

But about two weeks after CHOP was formed, Antonio Jr. left home to go see it for himself. I had no idea that he would travel that far. When we look back now at all these decisions in that first week of protest, police deciding to block off the road and then use crowd control while, police leaving their precinct, and then protesters deciding to form an occupation, it's hard not to wonder what would have happened if even one of those decisions had been different. Some protesters at the time had a bad feeling about staying. David Lewis was one of them. What were your feelings about occupying those thoughts?

That was instantly a mistake. That fundamental decision to stay there and occupy was very questionable. My suggestion was never to occupy. You stay in one spot, then your opposition, who at this point we knew SPD were nothing but opposition to this point, can strategize against you. Soon, protesters would face an existential threat

to this brand new occupation. It would inject fear into the encampment and shape the kind of protest Antonio would later step into. Somebody over there, Zay. I'm seeing how to use a gun? Take the clip out and put a back hand. That's on the next episode of We Keep Us Safe.

If you want to look at evidence from this episode, like the letter Antonio wrote for his dad, visit npr.org slash chop. We Keep Us Safe from NPR's Embedded is a collaboration with the Seattle Times and KUOW. The series is reported and written by me, Sidney Brownstone, David Gutman, Will James. This episode was edited by Luis Traeus and Laura Grenius, with support from Katie Simon.

This episode was produced by Dan Germa. Additional production support from David Goodhurst. Our senior producer is Adelina Lantianese. Additional reporting by Omari Salisbury, who contributed his recordings to this project, along with the live streamer Joey Weiser, research and fact-checking by Donya Solomon and Miyoko Wolf. Jimmy Keely mastered the episode. Music by Audio Network, Audio Socket, Mike Dottie, Sound Ideas, Ramteen Arablui, and Universal Music Production. I'm Sydney Brownstone.

I'm Will James. Thanks for listening. Hey, I'm Brady Fullwood, host of Seattle Eats. Smash burgers have taken over Seattle's restaurant scene from fast food to fine dining. But what gets lost when you pass up? down a patty. I want a course of grind so that I get little nubs of grind beef and I want it medium rare. It should be drippy and when I bite into it, it should be really juicy. On the latest episode, we find some classic burgers worth your money and your time. Listen to Seattle Eats on the KUOWW app or

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